Most beauty products are not safe and don’t work

Most beauty products are dangerous and beauty sapping. You’ve got to pick products with ingredients you would feel comfortable eating. This week we’ve looked at a 4 step routine for amazing skin after finding out that creams don’t work as a delivery mechanism for getting active beauty ingredients to do their thing inside your skin.

Now that we know the 4 steps we need to take, it’s time to choose the right products to use for each of the them. I’ve always found choosing beauty products very difficult. There’s a lot of hype and not much to back it up.

Natural Products vs. Dangerous Products

One of the most annoying truths about the ‘beauty’ industry is that almost all cosmetic and beauty products are not safe, and the icing on the cake is that they don’t even work! I find this annoying because I feel like a fool.

I’ve spent so much time in my life reading about products, trying them, spending money on them, and feeling hopeful that maybe the next product will do the things that are promised on the box! But they don’t even work! So basically I’ve been spending time on something that harms me and provides no benefit in return. Excellent.

Like a good grasshopper I have learned to stop seeking to enhance my beauty by looking in the wrong place. Beauty foods would have taken me much further.

You’re exposing yourself to 168 different ingredients every day and many of them are harming you

The average woman uses 12 products containing 168 different ingredients daily. Unfortunately many chemicals get trapped inside you where they can wreak havoc with your body systems. So called ‘beauty’ products contain things that can cause allergens, asthma, cancer, renal failure,  endocrine disruption, faster ageing, ADHD, and immune system disruption. Whew! We’re getting the exact opposite of what we intended from most commercial beauty products.

The environmental working group (EWG) has put together an impressive database of 73,000 beauty products and rated them as low risk, moderate risk and high risk products.

All the brands we know and use are on the high-risk lists

High risk products are common from companies like (in alphabetical order but this is not a complete list): Aveeno, Avene, Boots, Covergirl, Decleor, Dermalogica, Dr. Brandt, Garnier, Kerastase, L’Occitane, L’Oreal, La Roche Posay, Maybelline, Murad, Neutrogena, Obagi, Olay, Philosophy, Revlon, RoC, Rodial, Walgreens and so many more. The list is endless.

There are so many brands above that I didn’t expect to find on the list, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Almost ALL commercially made beauty products sold are harmful and will detract from your long-term health and beauty.

I know saying that pretty much every beauty product out there is harmful might sound like an extremist claim, but the reality is that beauty products are unregulated. The labelling is highly misleading (things labelled as natural or organic usually are only very minimally so), and dermatologists say there is very little medical meaning behind most claims.

You don’t have to waste your time with these pointless products any more

The beauty industry is one where the saying caveat emptor should be programmed into you, like a doll with a pull string. Buyer beware! Buyer beware! These words need to be permanently etched in your mind, before you enter a store and get swept away by marketing. For my own protection I have a simple rule (almost a mantra!) that I use to make decision making easy when it comes to commercially available cosmetic and beauty products:

“Don’t waste your time, it’s harmful and ineffective.”

The sad things is, it’s almost always true. Sometimes I am delighted to discover that I’m wrong, but my basic assumption is that most products are junk and in order to find truly safe cosmetics I need to specifically seek them out.

Natural Beauty Tip No. 9: Don’t waste your time with the beauty products found at your local drugstore. They don’t work and they’re harmful. You deserve better.

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